Method in XIX. Asır Türk Edebiyatı Tarihi: Albert Thibaudet’s Influence on Ahmet Hamdi Tanpınar

Abstract

In Ahmet Hamdi Tanpınar's Ondokuzuncu Asır Türk Edebiyatı Tarihi [The Nineteenth Century History of Turkish Literature], the analysis of the literary texts, authors, and historical context relies primarily on the literary historian’s particular understanding of the narrative of modernization in Turkish literature and a critical perspective behind this narrative. This perspective, which also shapes the aesthetics of Tanpınar's literary works, is in constant dialogue with various methods of literary historiography and critical theories. In his introduction, Tanpınar proclaims that he studied leading methods of literary history writing of Hippolyte Taine, Ferdinand Brunetière Julius Petersen, Eduard Wechssler, and Albert Thibaudet, and then embodied some of their approaches in order to survey the 19th century history of Turkish literature. This article argues that, although in his introduction Tanpınar refers to different literary historians and methods, his literary history displays greater influences from the French literary historian and critic Albert Thibaudet's method compared to others. In this context, the article analyzes the influence of Albert Thibaudet on the formation of Tanpınar's perspective on both literary historiography and literary criticism. More specifically the paper examines the influence of Albert Thibaudet on the formation of Tanpınar's perspective on the literary historiography and literary criticism in general, which has been neglected by the studies on Tanpınar in order to show how his extensive use of Thibaudet’s method provided opportunities for him and caused a few methodological and structural shortcomings in the XIX. Asır Türk Edebiyatı Tarihi.